Managing external workers: a new playground for HR department? total workforce management practices among belgian companies.

The labour market is undergoing many changes. Since the advent of the employee status - following the industrial revolution - the legal nature of the employment relationship differs in most countries between employee and self-employed status. Traditionally, jobs fall into one or the other, depending on one main criterion: the existence of a subordinate relationship between the worker and the employer (Rogers, 2016; Steinberger, 2018). In companies, for which stability and control of labour are then essential, the sourcing activity consists of offering workers an open-ended full-time salaried status.

In recent decades, this once solid boundary has been gradually blurred. The sourcing strategy of companies deviates more and more from this classic contractual relationship. Atypical work arrangements are increasingly being used, sometimes in a particular form of self-employed status - the solo self-employed worker, the freelancer, the on-call worker, etc. - and sometimes in an original form of employee status - the shared worker, the employee on call, etc. (Eurofound, 2020, Cappelli and Keller, 2013).

This strategy aims to increase organizational flexibility (Miles and Snow 1978, Kalleberg, 2001; Marsden, 2004), with the general assumption that it reduces the cost structure and allows the company to take advantage of technology (Serrano & Altuzzara, 2010). With the employment of an external workforce, the company has, in a very flexible way, access to advanced skills in a wider variety of business areas - such as IT, HR, finance, management or in specific projects (Cascio & Boudreau, 2017; McKeown & Cochrane, 2017) or to use low-skilled workers at a favorable price (De Stefano, 2015).

The rise of 'alternative work arrangements' (Cappelli & Keller, 2013) is radically transforming the structure of the workforce at company level. A 'mixed' workforce (Dong & Ibrahim 2017) - consisting of employees and self-employed workers - collaborating side by side in the workplace has thus become commonplace in many modern organizations (Davis-Blake et al., 2003).

While this development remains poorly documented, the existing literature shows that such a 'blended workforce' strategy is not without consequences for the conduct of organizations (Dong and Ibrahim, 2017; Cascio et al., 2017, Cross and Swart, 2021, Pichault and Naedenoen, 2022).

This article introduces the results of an original research that aims to investigate this notion of total workforce management. More specifically, we sought to answer the following three-fold research question: Which concepts are underpinning the TWM? How do companies practice TWM? And what is the role of the HR department?

The literature review reveals that the concept may be understood through the prism of six independent dimensions: infrastructure sharing, centralization of external workers management, socialization initiatives, reliance on organizational compliance, differentiation of actions between salaried and external workers, and formalization of TWM strategy and practices.

A mixed empirical approach was used, based on a quantitative survey of 239 Belgian companies and on interviews of 71 people active in three companies. The survey was designed in early 2019 and sent out in June 2019 to all client representatives of the main provider of administrative services in the Belgian labour market. The purpose of the survey was not only to document TWM practices, but also to construct six indicators in relation to the six dimensions of TWM previously identified in the literature review.

The interviews, conducted between 2019 and 2022, enabled us to draw up three monographs whose purpose is to illustrate TWM practices in three concrete cases and to understand the dynamics underlying these practices. The companies were selected to cover a diversity of situations.

The results show that companies have largely engaged in blended workforce sourcing practices, and that these external resources can be used for long-term strategic functions.

Furthermore, the analysis of the results across the six indicators of TWM are a useful lens to more deeply characterize current TWM practices. Most companies use informal TWM practices, do not differentiate internal and external workers and allow them sharing corporate infrastructures. The results concerning organizational compliance, socialization and centralization are more contrasted.

In addition, the interviews analysis helped us identifing several isomorphic pressures that may lead firms to adopt rather homogeneous TWM practices. Most companies adopt very similar behaviors due to isomorphic pressures related to operational constraints, to the Belgian legal framework, and to the growing influence of labor market intermediaries. The cross-analysis also reveals that there are specific pressures by type of external worker used in terms of socialization and organizational compliance.

Finally, the main lesson of this research comes from the cross-analysis of the six TWM indicators. It shows the crucial role that the HR department can play in developing TWM practices vis-à-vis external workers. In this sense, our research extends previous reflections on the potential responsibility of the HR department on the sustainability of external workers carreers (Zeitz et al., 2009; Mc Keown & Cochrane, 2017; Kost et al., 2020; Sulbout et al., 2022).

The work concludes with a series of recommendations likely to help companies implement a TWM policy adapted to their environment and the specificities of their organizational context.